It's late on a Sunday night and I've usually been asleep for hours by this time. But just as I got into bed tonight, my inconsiderate neighbor's pre-teenage kid decided it would be a good time to begin cranking up his electronic drum machine. This was about the fourth time today he did it - it's so loud you can hear it down the street. My husband was up and dressed, ready to go bang on her door, but she must have had a rare case of conscience and told him to stop, because he did.
But the damage was done and I couldn't get to sleep, so I'm up reading all the whining and moaning on the internet about how McCain's negative, race-baiting, dog whistle politics are going to cost Obama (and all of us) the election unless he grows a few and starts hitting back. My own tendency is to feel the same, to give in to a terrible sinking feeling that they are going to do it again: lie, cheat, steal and smear their way to the White House.
But this time, we can't give in to those feelings. The Republicans never do. They don't have any feelings other than resentment, jealousy, lust, greed, and raw ambition. When they think they are in danger of losing, they just get mean, nasty and ugly. Barack doesn't have to react in kind, but he does have to turn the tables on them somehow, and I trust that he will. He took down the Clinton machine and he will take down the McCain machine, but in his own way.
Have we so quickly forgotten the two disastrous weeks of Reverend Wright (kind of like last week with the flurry of attacks from McCain), when that was all you saw and heard every time you turned on the television? Have we forgotten that it took a few days before Obama gave that brilliant speech on race and neutralized everything?
Have we forgotten how Hillary mocked Obama, saying the clouds would open up and celestial choirs would sing and all would be right with the world? (Kind of like McCain's Obama - Moses ad.) Have we forgotten that it took a day or two for Obama to brush it off his shoulder?
Have we forgotten how well she did with blue collar gun owners after Obama's "bitter" comment and her selling herself as a daughter of rural Pennsylvania? Have we forgotten how he laughed and called her "Annie Oakley?"
McCain has only begun to fight. He is a smarmy, lying phony who will do and say anything to get what he wants. He threw a wife overboard. It's much easier to throw the black guy overboard. His lies and ugly attacks won't keep him up at night. He'll sleep like a baby in one of his seven houses.
But we either believe in our candidate or we don't. We were warned by Hillary that McCain would do this. We were warned that she was the tough one who knew how to deal with them, and maybe she was right. But we believed in Barack Obama, in his goodness, his values, his abilities and his steely spine. We saw something in him that was new and different, and we watched him handle attack after attack with dignity and grace as well as with strength. We sensed it was his time, our time, to make history. We have to trust him now. We have to believe.
If all of us hang tight, do what we can for his election, talk to everyone we know, write letters to networks that get it wrong, scream our heads off when McCain acts like an ass-hole, and above all trust in the man we believe will make an amazing president, we won't be disappointed.
A friend of mine once told me "thoughts are things, and they have enormous power." We have to keep the faith, and hold the thought that Barack Obama has the intelligence, the skill and the ability to defeat John McCain.
Yes he can! Keep the faith! I sense history will be made this year.
